I'm a little woozy

I spent the day refinishing our dining room table, and the vapors are giving me the vapors.

Actually, by "refinishing our dining room table" I mean "sanding and restaining two legs that had gotten all alligatory" so by "spent the day" I really mean "spent a grand total of about 35 minutes" because the entire surface area I worked on was about two square feet, and those 35 minutes included two coats of stain. In my defense, though, I'll probably need a third coat of stain and some kind of sealant that will probably have to cover the whole table to give everything a consistent sheen. Which could conceivably take a few hours. Which almost adds up to a day. If you use certain kinds of math.

In any case, the freshly stained legs look pretty amazing. And by "amazing" I mean "like the alligators had never attacked in the first place." Which is all you really hope to achieve in a project like this.

Besides, I don't have much time to be rubbing away endlessly at a beat-up old (yet marvelously polished and well cared for) dining room table; I've recently discovered Scrabulous!™, the highly addictive but not officially sanctioned Facebook version of Scrabble®, which is probably my favorite game in the whole world. OK, my second favorite game in the whole world, right after Too Many Shoes!®, the highly addictive shopping game that apparently doesn't have a finish line.

In any case, I've been on Facebook for about a month, and just last weekend I discovered Scrabulous!™ and its magical powers over every last moment of my life. On Scrabulous!™, you can play multiple not-officially-Scrabble® games with multiple people all at the same time. You add a word when you're logged on, see, then your opponent adds a word when he or she is logged on while in the mean time you log back on every 13.5 seconds to see if it's your turn again. Fortunately, there doesn't appear to be a limit to the number of games you can have going at once, so I'm currently playing ... um ... 15 games. ("Hi. My name's Jake. And I'm a Scrabulous!™aholic.") And I'm getting my ass kicked in two of them. (My former friend Bill is at this writing walloping me 365 to 128, with an "existed" that netted him 94 frigging points. But I got 8 points for "hen," so I'm catching up.)

I hope the magical pull of Scrabulous!™ wears off (or the copyright infringement jury finds for the plaintiff) before the spring thaw, though, because I just registered to run the 2008 Chicago Marathon. And I probably should eventually step away from the computer and do some training for it.

This will be my fifth* marathon, and I'll run it at the age of 40—a tidy little divisible-by-five coincidence that means nothing, though it passes a few marginally interesting pieces of information along in what trained writers would call exposition. And if I run it in four hours, there will be additional divisible-by-fourness to add to the math fun. Whee!

*For those of you keeping score at home, I have entered four marathons so far and, thanks to last year's mid-marathon cancellation, finished only three. BUT! I've kept an emergency replacement marathon in my back pocket all this time; I ran a full marathon-length training run a few summers ago. So I can still say I've run four complete marathons without perjuring myself if I get called before the marathon tribunal. Assuming such a tribunal exists and for some reason I get called before it.

My peeps (I use peeps to show that I'm down with the kids, yo) and I aren't running with the AIDS Marathon program this year, though. Their training program focuses on getting you across a finish line instead of reaching a time goal, and I really want to beat four hours this year. Plus, I really hate asking people for money. (So click the icon near the top right of your screen and sponsor me in Hustle up the Hancock already so I can stop asking. Ahem.) Plus, some Saturdays I'd really rather run at 2:00 in the afternoon instead of 5:00 in the morning. Somebody's going to be 40 awfully soon, so somebody needs his beauty rest.

Speaking of rest, it's pretty late on a school night, so somebody had better stop blogging and get some sleep.

Just as soon as he checks his Scrabulous!™ games, of course. Because words are more important than sleep. Especially when they give you triple-word scores.